RICHARD AVEDON IMMORTAL BOOK (ENGLISH)

For more than half a century, Richard Avedon sought to represent advancing age in the faces of the people he photographed with rare honesty. From his earliest years at Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue through to the twenty-first century, Avedon deliberately broke the rule of flattering public personalities in his portraits. Instead, he chose to highlight the onslaught of what he called the “avalanche of age,” dramatising the universal experience of getting older.

Accompanying a groundbreaking exhibition at The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University and The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Immortal is the first book to delve into this under-represented element of Avedon’s practice.

This elegant hardcover volume features nearly 100 portraits of cultural luminaries, each printed in striking tritone, such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Truman Capote, Marcel Duchamp, Duke Ellington, Toni Morrison, Patti Smith and Stephen Sondheim, as well as one of Avedon’s last self-portraits.

Texts by a star-studded cohort of authors and critics, including Vince Aletti, Adam Gopnik, Paul Roth and Gaëlle Morel, shed new light on Avedon’s radical approach to portraiture and ageing.

Thoughtfully edited and beautifully produced, Immortal testifies emphatically to the power of art to confront the inevitable reality of mortality without filters or concessions.

Language: English.